Technical Skills

Creative Skills

Adobe Suite

Tutorial Copy Writing

Video Guides

DAW Digital Audio

Music Production

Photography

Video Editing FCPX

Motion / VFX After Effects

Stop Motion Animation

Experience

I'm Martin. A Shropshire born London survivor, Bristol enthusiast, returned to the motherland of Shrewsbury UK.
I'm a front end developer, with a background in design and I specialise in Drupal theming and site building.

Below are some details of my web agency work history, but first a little about my general professional background.

I've worked at some of the UK’s most respected Drupal based web agencies, including Brightlemon and New Digital Partnership (now NDP Studio) in London and Microserve in Bristol. I have built and styled the front end of 100s of both static HTML and Drupal based dynamic websites, applications and tool sets for many small, medium and large clients, ranging from start-ups to large charities, non-profits to well known brands and organisations such as The British Council, Sky, NHS and Readers Digest.

With an extensive background in Drupal CMS, I have a keen awareness and passion for delivering clients the tools they need to publish and administer the content of their own websites in an intuitive and robust way as possible, also often providing face to face training, written documentation and video guides on how to get the most from their tailored CMS platform. I have also written several tutorial blogs regarding Drupal, Bootstrap and front end development in general and have been responsible for writing in-house Drupal theming guides and creating custom boilerplate, starter themes for use by in-house developers.
My current bolierplate themes for Drupal 7 and 8 are light weight themes based on a 'bootstrapesq' grid system and a host of Drupal secific SASS variables, mixins and helper classes, without the bloat of a full framework like Bootstrap or Foundation.

Having worked with many charities, educational and government clients I'm an advocate and guardian of accessibility, UX and usability. As well as this informing my own approach to web development, I’ve often also been called upon to audit existing websites and produce reports on their usability, use of web design and Drupal best practices and quality of their front end code.

During my time at NDP, I was also actively involved with the architecting and refining of our web specific production processes, in-house training and recruitment.

2016 -

Front End Developer

I'm currently pushing pixels and manipulating ones and zeros at Siruss LTD in my home town of Shrewsbury, where I returned in 2016 after many years working in London and Bristol.

My duties include site buiding and theming Drupal 7 and 8 sites as well as configuarion and custom theming of Shopify eCommerce stores. I'm also known to turn my hand to IA wireframing and design work when needed.

2014 - 2015

Front End Developer, Drupal Themer & Site Builder

Building and theming responsive Drupal CMS websites for small and large clients. Wire-framing and site mapping. Interactive prototyping using Bootstrap, HTML, LESS, SASS, web/icon fonts and Jquery. Performing accessibility, UX, simple SEO and performance audits of 3rd party sites. Drupal core and module security maintenance of existing client sites. Design of in-house brand collateral. Writing Front End tutorials for the company blog.

Martin has a wealth of Drupal theming experience, dating all the way back to Drupal 5, which along with his design skills makes him a pretty solid Drupal developer.

A particularly focused (front-end) skill set, makes him a master of his craft. When it comes to design principles, usability, accessibility, and working with different devices and browsers, Martin is certainly your man!

Martin has also got a very in-depth knowledge of Bootstrap, with his Bootstrap blogs being by far the most popular and engaging posts on the Microserve website.

Last but not least Martin is also great fun to work with. He has a great sense of humour, clients love him, and he has a positive working attitude.

Rick DonohoeAccount Manager at Microserve

2009 - 2014

Front End Developer, Drupal Themer & Site Builder

Taking in-house and client supplied designs and converting them into accessible and compliant fixed and responsive Drupal themes.

Styling and CMS Site building of small, medium and large sites, social networks and eComs for clients ranging from SMEs, small NPOs to large charity and commercial entities. Assisting management with the planning of production processes, training and recruitment. Wrote, built and themed an internal training guide called “Way Of The Drupal Theme Ninja”. (A practical tips,tricks, best practice resource for the company’s new and more junior themers.) : www.drupalthemeninja.info.

Martin is one of the best front end developers I've ever had the pleasure working with. We worked together at NDP for over 3 years and he soon became my go-to person whenever I had any " theme" or UX questions.

He is not only the best Drupal themer (ninja, he says) but also a great fun to work with, despite his very pragmatic outlook on anything and everything.

His years of experience of working in digital agencies make him a valuable person in developing and growing new teams and internal processes. I would love to work with Martin again if only he was willing to swap Bristol for Sydney

Lucie KasnaPartner at New Digital Partnership

2006 - 2009

Web Designer & Drupal Themer

Design and theming of small and large Drupal sites, eComs and social networks for various government, local authority, charity and educational clients. Design and styling of dynamic, template engine based sites and proprietary and open source content management systems. (smarty, typo3 etc - We adopted Drupal as our standard platform at version 5) Design and build of accessible and compliant static HTML websites/ pages. Contributing to the company blog.

Martin was an early adopter of Drupal and worked on some very large and high profile projects at BrightLemon as both designer and themer. A great person to have in the office, he was a real asset to the team.

Martin is reliable and thorough, creative as a designer but also structured and logical as a themer - he had the exact mix of skills you need for front end Drupal. He researches best practices and continually keeps up to date and incorporates them into his work.

We used to spend time each week at BrightLemon for self training and blogging and Martin put his to very good use - he is a very good wordsmith and wrote some of the most popular blogs on our web site.

I would definitely work with Martin again (I have tried a couple of times but he keeps moving further away from London!). Maybe one day eh?